


Think yourself already dead

by Aethelar



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Dark!Graves, Gen, Graves doesn't actually know, is he, mindfuckery, or maybe not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 01:19:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8870167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar
Summary: Anonymous asked:Do you think Graves would start to think after Grindelwald that maybe he is evil inside and that's why no one noticed? And start to doubt himself and his morals and if maybe in the end he is just like the Dark Lords he fought so hard to destroy?





	

That… is very deep and philosophical for two in the morning. Gimme a sec to put the kettle on, I’ll be right back.

Ok. So, here’s how it could go down.

Grindelwald fucks with people. It’s what he does. People aren’t people to him, not on the same level he is - they’re pawns, they’re annoyances, they’re maybe curiosities, but they aren’t people. It’s perfectly legitimate, in his mind, for him to do whatever he likes because he’s working towards something monumentally greater than anything their tiny minds could ever conceive of.

Therefore, he feels no guilt whatsoever about messing with Graves.

He does it, first, with the prison he keeps Graves in. It’s nothing so crass as a physical prison, nor so overly grand as a magical fortress - it’s a prison of his mind. As an aside Nonnie, hope to god that Grindelwald never meets Queenie, because she casts herself into people’s minds with careless abandon and love and Grindelwald is an occlumens that will trap her in his shields and tear her love to bloody shreds on the altar of his hatred.

For Graves, he uses something more subtle. He uses memories of cases gone wrong, cases gone right in a way that cost too much, calls that Graves made that weren’t straight forward black and white. He stitches them together into parodies of the future (it’s what gives him the idea when he lies to Credence about his visions) that are built on the truth Grindelwald makes - Graves’ face with Grindelwald’s derisive scorn, Graves’ walk with Grindelwald’s arrogant swagger, Graves’ voice sentencing Tina to death with Grindelwald’s careless boredom.

He feeds the memories to Graves as they happen. They mesh, blend, blur with the voices that tug at the edge of Graves’ sense of self. He hunches in his mind like Sirius Black against the dementors: I am not what they say I am. I am innocent of these crimes.

And then he gets out.

He reads through the case reports.

He finds a child he saw himself sentence to death for petty smuggling, and he reads in black and white the date and time of their execution.

He looks up when he hears laughter, his aurors sharing a joke, and he hears the fearful hush that falls over the department when his gaze falls on them.

He leaves for some fresh air, a walk to clear his head, and he catches sight of himself in the mirrored polish of the Woolworth’s marble walls. His reflection walks with a confidence he mistakes as arrogance, his coat flares around his hips in a way he interprets as Grindelwald’s swagger.

He burns the coat.

He works to get Tina reinstated, but the easy camaraderie between them is gone. He doesn’t know if he fired her. He remembers doing it, but he wouldn’t, surely he wouldn’t have done it? Grindelwald won’t say when he started impersonating Graves. None of the aurors noticed the switch. Graves remembers doing it, but he remembers many things that Grindelwald wanted him to see.

He keeps working, because it’s all he has. Family is long gone, and the friendships he’d built lie in tattered ruins - did _he_  do that? Or did Graves? It matters less, now, than it used to. The friendships are ruined either way.

There is a case (there are always cases) with a girl (would it matter if she was a woman?) who’d broken the law (such an irrelevant little law) to save her father’s life (how sweet). The potions she’d been dealing were the sort that men killed to take and that killed men who stopped taking them. The law demanded a fine that the girl couldn’t pay; in lieu of a fine, the law demanded time in jail.

If she went to jail, her father would suffer without her care. If she did not, if Graves let her off, she would do it again and more lives would be claimed by the potions she dealt for money. He has to make the call.

He cannot make the call.

He has to make the call.

He sends her out without a fine but makes her wear a tracker. He traces the potions she sells and the potions she buys and he tries to tackle the drug ring from both sides. She is killed by a terrified client for turning traitor and helping the aurors. Graves makes his arrests.

He slouches back in his office chair (he rarely goes home where it’s dark and it’s empty and memories whisper from behind shadowed walls) and doesn’t care, really, if he made the right call. Instead he asks: _do I care that she died? Or do I care that I lost a resource?_  He asks: _did I spare her for sympathy? Or because I had a use for her?_ He asks: _does it matter? The result is the same either way._

The result is the same either way.

How can you tell if you’re a dark lord? Good and evil only exist in stories, in real life there’s real people making crap decisions and holding too tightly to shitty ideals that lead them to madness and ruin.

How can you tell if the result’s the same either way?

Graves has been Graves for over a year now, or maybe he’s been trapped in his mind while Grindelwald swaggers and drips disdain into his words. His aurors don’t laugh around him. He writes up reports of people who died because he didn’t save them, and does it matter if he tried? If he wanted to? The result is the same either way.

It’s the _same_ and it makes him want to _scream_  that what good does it do? What good? Why bother, why try - why _care_  and wouldn’t it be easier, wasn’t it easier, when he was Grindelwald and Grindelwald was him and maybe he’d always been because people can’t tell the fucking _difference_  and -

Wouldn’t it be easier, if people weren’t people and Graves could do with them what he likes? He’s the auror. The director. He’s working on things they can’t understand. It would be easier, if they weren’t people, if Graves didn’t have to care about them. The result would be the same either way.

(it’s easier to think yourself already dead than face the pain of dying one day at a time; he screams in his sleep and grindelwald slithers through his waking thoughts and graves, graves, what did you see when grindelwald fed you visions of the future? what do you see?)


End file.
